Challenge: Create a two hour setlist of cover songs appropriate for a farmers market busker that does not contain any songs you have ever heard sung or played at a farmers market.
This one is titled “To Me the Converging Objects of the Universe Perpetually Flow,” which is what happens when you fill the time between customers at the craft market reading your pocket edition of Walt Whitman and doodling.
This is, I don’t know what. Reptilian love child of Pennsylvania Dutch and Zuni?
Recently there have been several major mathematical breakthroughs enabled entirely by AI: both proofs and counterexamples to long-held conjectures. Ordinarily I read about this sort of ting with interest. Now I find I simply don’t care. Mathematics may have its uses but it is not interesting because it is useful; it is interesting because it is beautiful. The pursuit of mathematics is valuable not because it is important to be right but because the pursuit of it is beautiful. It is not like having a cure for cancer and not minding where it came from. It is the difference between watching a dancer and watching a computer simulation of a dance. If it isn’t human, to hell with it.
At Roy Underhill’s window-making class, 2022… At the end of the first day he went around the room sweeping the entire class’s shavings to each bench and took these faked photos.
Facing the usual early-July glut of cherry tomatoes I made confit: basil leaves in a baking dish, a layer of whole cherry tomatoes, a few crushed cloves of garlic, a liberal sprinkle of salt and enough olive oil to come about halfway up the tomatoes. Roast at 325F for maybe an hour until slightly brown on top and wrinkled.
I was afraid I was wasting two pints of tomatoes but honestly the result is one of the best things I have ever eaten. (Though I do say that about once a month.) The confit went into a couple of half-pint containers in the freezer, whence I’ll have pasta sauce in a couple of months when the season is over.
“It is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.” —Hawthorne
When I finished Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers last month I wanted to post something here more than the “finished reading” flag that feels like awarding myself a medal; but I didn’t get around to it. Read Morten Høi Jensen’s review instead, and then do read the book:
For the most part, they are characters we only ever know socially, as it were, either in dialogue or by their consumption of goods. Yet by fixing the narrative in their various households and domestic concerns, Tergit’s novel rebels against the remorseless one-way traffic of history. Here, banal instances of private life jostle against political turning points. Tergit’s novel rescues those moments that history would not only fail to record but would obliterate the memory of….
Naturally, it is difficult to read Effingers without also reading the Holocaust back into its pages, yet the novel frustrates this response by the sheer abundance of life it evokes. Tergit, writing to a publisher in 1949, was adamant that what she had written was “not the novel of Jewish fate.” If that’s all it was, it might be of only historical interest, yet who among its twenty-first century readers could fail to find its account of a liberal, cosmopolitan culture’s downfall distressingly resonant?
Ran across this fascinating toy that lets you see the night sky from any point on earth at any time in history.